If you are a salesforce administrator or developer or a consultant, one of the goals which you have on the back of your mind is to get the basic developer or admin certifications out of the way as soon as possible which differentiates you from the other developers and administrators in the industry. We have the experience in salesforce crm and know how to provide solutions to our users but the one question is how confident are you now to say that you can pass the online exam of salesforce? There is a lot of material on the web with respect to mock exams and questions and study material which takes us to 100 directions. We are not sure most of the times whether our answers are correct and some  times we underestimate the exam . We take the exam and fail and salesforce does not provide any feedback on what areas did we do good and which areas we need to improve? So what is the strategy to make sure we pass the exam in the first attempt within a month?  I have been through this many times and have helped a lot of developers , administrators and consultants with this effort and achieved 90% success ratio of getting them certified in the first attempt within a month. Here is my strategy.

Review the study guide and Asses your strong and weak  topic categories

The first thing to do for the certification is to download the latest study guide and identify the topic categories like Data model, Analytics, Reports etc . Find out how many topics are there and what is the percentage of questions for each topic. For the developer certification it is 60 questions total and you need to get 68% which means 41 questions you need to answer correctly. We have a mock test which would help you to evaluate which topics are weak and which are your strength and find out easily. So creating 4 combinations of which topics added together would get you around 55 questions in total  would help you to strategically identify the topics you focus more and topics which you need to work a lot.

Question Strategy

Salesforce questions belong to the following types. Remember this is an online tool which generates the same questions in a random order to every candidate.

• Memory or fact related questions ( how many master detail relationships can an object have)
• Situational questions( Given a business requirement how would you go about solving it using features of salesforce)
• Trick question( Questions where you would need to select the best 2 or 3 from the 4 and wordings matter a lot)
• Heavy worded questions( These are questions explaining a situation in 5 sentences and looking for a straight answer)
• Repeat questions( These are questions which tend to repeat a lot from test to test and the chances of answering them are easy)
• Debugging questions( Given a situation and a problem, how would you solve the issue in real time)
• Exception question( These are questions on features in salesforce  which will not work for sure. e.g  snapshot feature will not work on Matrix reports, A user with no read only permission for owd for an object can never access the object)

The key for these questions  is to have a plan on tackling each question type and solving them with adequate practice which would provide you the confidence to pass the exam.

Focus on your weak categories, prepare and reassess your performance.

There might be some odd categories like optional features like territory management, currency where the questions are very focused and look for specific answers. e.g of a question would be what should you be aware of as  a developer when currency feature is enabled? Now salesforce help text provides valuable information on these topics and reading the help text in salesforce for each feature on best practices section helps to answer these question.

Pointers for Memory oriented questions.

For memory oriented questions like file size attachment allowed, visual force view state size, creating a flash card and reviewing it 3 times a week will help to memorize the topics. There are plenty of websites which generate flash cards and you can keep them on your phone to make you remember it.

Mock Exam preparation

Going to the exam with no mock exam practice is like running a marathon without any practice of running where you would start rusty and get tired and won out in the middle of the exam. So I would recommend at least 6 to 8 mock exams which you should do 2 days before the exam which stays fresh in memory for you. You should be prepared to sit for 1.5 hours in a place and keep your mind focused on the exam.

Strategy on the Exam

Now comes the exam day where you are at the exam center and ready to take the test. Here are 2 things which you should really do to avoid the last minute tension and fear.

1. 1. Scheduling day

Try to schedule your test on a Monday morning so that you can get the entire week end for preparing for the exam . This will keep you focused and you don’t have the support calls and annoyances from your work bothering you!! If you are lucky, you can take the Friday off and start with a bang.

1. Get a map of the test center in advance and go atleast 30 minutes early for the test and have the code with you.

1. 3. On the exam

Now once you hit the magic start button, your focus should be to answer the easy questions and mark the hard questions or not sure questions for review as you go and hit each question. Some people panic on the hard question and waste their time answering or guessing it. So skip it and take the next question and keep doing it.

Last 30 Minutes Review!! Review!! Review. Identify  the bad options and focus on the good option

1. Your goal should be to complete all the 60 questions in one hour so that you can use the 30 minutes for review. So during review focus on the review questions and here is a simple tip. Out of the 4 choices, find out the 2 choices which you know for sure are the bad ones and eliminate them. Focus on the 2 choices which you think are right and try to read each word carefully and eliminate the bad choice.
2. Make a tally mark on your paper to find out how many questions you know for sure you have answered correctly and you know you would pass in them. If it gets pass the 50 question mark, focus on the hard questions where you are not sure.

Last 10 Minutes

1. Once you answer all the review questions, uncheck the review box and keep the hardest question for the last time.
2. Review all the questions for one last time carefully where you can eliminate a lot of silly mistakes on the answers.
3. Use the last 5 minutes to review the hard questions and eliminate the one bad answer from the good option list.

You should pass now and celebrate your success!!!

Bizimpact IT solutions offer GetForceCertifiedinamonth packages where we specialize in training developers, Consultants and Administrators to pass the exam in  a month on the first attempt in there certification exams. Please email us at info@thylaksoft.com for further questions or call us at 302-355-0449. Feel free to add your comments on the blog and I would be glad to answer it for you.

 

Order management software vendors always have a constant problem of getting new leads for there software product and some times a lot of time is wasted on getting the right lead. There are plenty of ecommerce shopping carts and there is always a demand for integrating there ecommerce shopping carts with your ERP system. Integration takes time from your resources and some times can become too expensive to understand all the shopping carts.  What if there is one cloud service which would allow your ERP system to be integrated with all the shopping carts? What if we can also offer you a lead generation channel where we can provide you new leads and visibility to a total new customer segment which would result in increase in revenue? Here is how this would work for you. . Get New leads and increased visibility to a new customer segment We offer a cloud based integration solution where we would offer an integration service to your ERP system for your customers. In the case of  Magento ecommerce  shopping cart, we would build the plugin and host it on the Magento community which would offer visibility to a lot of  new customers who are planning to use Magento. Currently Magento community has close to 100,000 retailersusing the software and by building the extension and hosting it, your ERP system is now visible to all these retailers. We would provide leads to you from the Magento channel on retailers who want to use an ERP and help you to close the deal as the integration is already in place for it. Seamless integration with your ERP at reduced cost Being a software vendor, it is always challenging to create api for each shopping cart and costly to use the resources who would be wasting there time understand every shopping cart. With our cloud Ecommerce connector, our team would build the plugin for your extension with our experience in the shopping carts at a reduced time which would help your current customers to synchronize with any shopping cart they want. Position  your product with xcommerce which is the EBAY Cloud With the acquisition of magento by Ebay, Ebay is building the next generation retail cloud which is xcommerce. This product is set to launch in a year. This would provide the following benefits to you. a. Ebay is going to be tightly integrated with Magento which would pave the way for opening up a new channel of retailers using Ebay to your product. b. Paypal would be the primary payment vendor offered by EBAY. Paypal is venturing into the retail payment gateway market and with your product integrated with paypal would turn out to be a competitive advantage for your product. So there is a new channel and increased payment processing partnerships which can be leveraged with this platform. We at Thylaksoft would help your product to be positioned for this and help your company to increase your sales. Please feel free to email me at Click here to email me or call us at 302-355-0449for further questions regarding this.

1. Automatic customer registration and approval realtime

Most of the B2B customer process starts with registration of the customer initially. Finance department reviews the customer profile and approves the pricing for the customer. Since magento does not have a solution to do  this automatically, here is our solution.

a. We create a syncing module which would identify the B2B customer as a particular customer group which would be done realtime

b. Our integration solution would transfer the customer to ERP like SAP, Netsuite or Mass 200 realtime.

c. Once the customer is approved, our integration solution would transfer the customer back to Magento. So with the help of this automation solution, we can easily manage the B2B customer registration easily.

2. Synchronize orders from Magento to ERP and back

Most of  the integration solutions perform the synchronizing of orders from Magento to ERP system. The solutions range from Talend, EBridge etc but to ensure the integration happens , you need to do the following

a. Create order id on both applications like magento and erp and store the order id for both systems for synchronization

b. Make sure the products are created and managed in one system and the integration solution would just transfer the products to magento only.

3.  Manage pricing level of products with different customers.

Most of the B2B customers are offered different price points based on each sku or category level. So the challenge is how to manage a product file which has 5 or more pricing levels for  each product and customer? To do this, our solution would work as follows.

1. Based on the ERP system, our solution would query the sku and each prices of the products and store it in magentoo.

2. We can create customer groups for each price level and assign the customer to the price group. This would be an automated solution to capture prices.

4. Track shipments to customers.

Warehouse systems store the shipment and tracking information for the customers. The challenge is integrating Magento with ERP and warehouse system. To do this, our solution would be to query the orders from ERP system and post the orders to warehouse. Our integration solution would then query the warehouse system and update it to Magento. This would allow the customer to get notified on the status of the orders as soon as the order is shipped.

We specialize in B2B sales using Magento and have extensions which  would allow you to track your quotes, prices and customers in Magento easily. Please feel free to email us at info@thylaksoft.com or call us at 302-355-0449 for further questions.

1. Standardize and identify  the pos data from different distributors.

Since most of the distributor files are in a csv or excel format, it is important to identify the fields like customer first name, last name, order id, sku number and serial number and define a list of fields which are important for the import to a crm. Each distributor file should have the following which would help in synchronization.

a. Sku number which is unique for a product

b. customer id which can be the distributor customer id

c. sales rep id

d. reseller id

e. serial number for the product.

Once all the fields are defined, create an excel import template which would have all these fields mapped. Our solution would import the excel files and parse them to get the right data for the excel import template from the distributor file.

2. Quick import of the pos data to your CRM.

Most of the crm like salesforce come with a tool like data loader which would allow for easy import of the excel import template to salesforce. Our solution would store the pos data in a temporary staging data till it is processed by the automatic solution. Mapping templates can be created  which would map the fields with temporary staging object so that the data import is seamless.

3. Automated solution to assign the pos data to right account, customer, salesrep, distributor and reseller.

Once the data is staged for processing, our custom process solution would read the pos data and start assigning the orders to the correct customer, opportunity, account  and flag the opportunity  to the sales rep , territory and reseller. Using the synhronization keys, our custom solution would check the salesforce database for duplicates and create the opportunity for the correct customer, account and contact in salesforce . Our automated script would run at regular intervals during the day and update a transaction log on the status of each pos data processed. If there is a new reseller or customer in the pos data, our solution can flag this for review which can be rerun later for processing. Our solution can also be run manually by clicking a button in case the automated solution takes a long time to run or complete.

So using this 3 step process, we can easily automate the entire process of importing the pos data saving 30% of the sales operation team which can be used for sales process. Please feel free to email me directly at buyan@thylaksoft.com or call us at 302-355-0449 for further questions regarding this.

1.Check your application for compliance with salesforce.

Before thinking of integrating your software with salesforce, you need to make sure that the following features are built in place as a first step.

1. Make sure your application has an api to handle requests from salesforce in the form of soap requests, xml or query string parameters. So for all the data points of integration, Api or requests should exist in your application.

2.  Single signon is also a must capability. For integration needs which involve real time integration for users to view both applications, your current saas application should be capable of handling oauth protocol for real time user log in. A module to handle login parameter with authentication , handling invalid requests is a must. Your application should also be able to return session id to salesforce which would allow the user to be always logged in salesforce.

3. Make sure your application can be white labelled. Since most of the integration in salesforce would involve creating custom header, footer with a look and feel to meet the customer needs, it is important to design your application to handle the request and display corresponding look and feel to meet the needs of your customer. This would help in iframing your application to run as a separate tab inside salesforce.

2.  Identify the data elements needed for integration.

Most of the integration requirements fail because of a lack of data mapping strategies not followed between 2 applications. Once a customer talks to you on an integration need with salesforce, you should first identify all the entities like leads, accounts, contacts, articles, cases etc from salesforce and create a laundry list of all data elements required. For each of the object in salesforce, create a corresponding entity list in your saas application which would complete the mapping requirement. After the mapping is done , the next step is to identify which application would create the data, which application would modify the data and where we need to display the data on both applications. This would help to identify the touch points of your application which needs to be modified to handle the integration needs.

3. Validate your integration strategy to meet  governor limits in salesforce

Once the integration entities are finalized, here is the common solutions followed on integration.

a. real time integration

b. batch mode integration

c. asynchronous integration or call backs.

For real time integration, if there is a need to post data from salesforce to your application, a custom visual force page fits in nicely to perform the integration as you wanted. Now on screens where you would show a grid of says documents or cases , if there is a need to display real time status of the data on your application, real time calls for a huge volume of records would never get across in salesforce. So to control this, an apex job which would populate the data would be an ideal need.

When you perform batch mode integration handling huge volume of records, it is always important to keep in mind of controlling the number of queries in salesforce . The governor limit of soql queries is very limited to 1000 and so it is important to do one time query in salesforce and cash it in memory rather than making individual calls for each record.

For asynchronous integration where there is a need for your application to notify salesforce on completion of a status, salesforce has a call back feature which would allow your application to post back the data to salesforce. Now if you want salesforce to react to the post, a workflow rule or trigger can perform the needed feature. It is important to create a custom visual force page or a controller to handle the call back request and perform the needed feature immediately.

4. Address signon for users in both applications.

One of the things when you plan to integrate is to make a list of different types of users who would use salesforce and your application. Examples would salesforce portal users, regular user and some time users with specific permission like article management, create permissions etc. So creating a list of users and there types and matching it with your saas application user types is important . If a user is to be created, it is always a good practice to create the user in your saas application and provide him the role and permission and create the same user manually in saleforce with the right permissions.  A synchronization key or token which can be used as an identifier with both applications would help to sync up both users.

5. Creating success criteria for integration and evaluating integration tools.

Once the requirements are created, before turning to a vendor or a system integrator for a project, it is important to define success criterias on how would the verification be done once the integration module is in place. To create the success criteria, the common technique is to make sure the count of records in both salesforce and your saas product match and if there is any discrepancy, there is a roll back mechanism to fix the bad records.  Identifying workflows which touch across all integration points would help to test the application from a functional perspective. In situations where there is a need to migrate data from your saas application to salesforce, it is important to identify all the entities and tactics of loading the data are discussed upfront and identified.

In case of batch processes, it is important to create transaction records which would help to identify which batches are running and the status on a batch and a detail level as well. Some times cloud based integration tools like Talend, Informatica or Boomi might be a good fit to run the adhoc process on them rather than running it on individual servers which would take too much time on maintenance.

We specialize in integrating Saas applications with salesforce and have several checkslists which would help to find out if your application is compliant, estimating your integration needs and also building on the app exchange. Please feel free to email me directly at info@thylaksoft.com or call us at 302-355-0449 for further questions.

Defining and Automating  the rules for SLA for your customers

Most of the SLA agreements on Saas companies are generated based on response time, resolution on priority issues . If  you are using service cloud, then each the response time could easily be tracked by the first activity on a case which was created which would be an automatic email on creation of the case. By tracking the date and time when the case was resolved or closed, the SLA breach could be identified as a difference between the case creation time with the time when the case was resolved. In cases of resolution, an automatic workflow rule or trigger can flag the case for breach of SLA by finding the difference in case open and resolution status date and time. Our solution would automatically flag the case for breaches  based on the rules defined to the customer on SLA.

Track SLA breaches

With the help of a SLA Tracking dashboard or summary report, we can the SLA Breach factor for each customer which is the total number of cases breached for an account to the total cases submitted by the customer. Our solution would automate this and send it to the customer or a support manager on the performance of  the team on the cases for a specific customer. This  SLA Tracker report would offer greater insight on cases which are breached to the cases which were resolved on time and would allow the support team to identify reasons for delay and avoid it in the future. We will create a score card on the support team performance on a monthly basis and can also automate the entire score card to the customers in the form of an automated email report or a screen which they can login to the customer portal to view.

Capture Knowledge and Improve customer satisfaction and retention.

A weekly review of the cases which were breached would open the needs for capturing the knowledge. We help in categorizing the cases on solutions, complexity, resolution reason and create solutions to avoid in the future. With the knowledge getting captured continuously on cases , the support team can resolve cases more quickly leading to more customer satisfaction and retention rates.

Thylaksoft helps Independant software vendors to build a SLA tracking solution which would help to track, monitor  and automate the whole SLA  process which would improve the customer retention rate. Please feel free to call us at 302-355-0449 or email us at info@thylaksoft.com for further questions.

We specialize in managing high volume of records in salesforce and use several techniques to handle the data. Here is a list of items to watch out for in your end to avoid the governor limit errors.

1.  Watch out for roll up fields

When you have roll up fields for example summing up contacts for accounts or summing up activities on cases etc, it would start executing insert as well as update triggers. So in a standard object like account or case , some times developers would have created insert and update triggers to perform some rules on the object.  So any time when we mass import data, the roll up fields would execute both the insert and update triggers causing duplicate soql queries to run and exceed the governor limit. There is no need to execute update queries but salesforce would execute it due to the roll up field. So the solution is to handle on your update triggers logic by using flags to prevent code to execute on update triggers.

2. Use fields to do the aggregates and avoid them if possible.

If you have visual force pages built on your org, where there is summary of objects like cases or opportunities and if there is totals done on the bottom, the pages would start bombing out as soon as the volume of records increases.  This is not a scalable solution and causes extreme frustration. To solve this, we use a technique called aggregation on the object level than doing it at run time. So we would create fields on the individual object and have triggers to populate data real time on the field.

So for e.g if you want to say display cases for each account and show counts on each status at the bottom of the page, instead of calculating the total at real time, you would create a field for each status on the account object and have triggers populating the total on that object. So on the visual force pages, you can query the data from the account object directly instead of doing the totals by aggregate.

3. Look for Loops.

When you have a lot of for loops on your triggers, there are situations where the developers would have created soql queries for each record which really starts hitting on the governor limit on the soql query count. So to avoid this, use the select queries on the beginning of the loop and use maps to store the result or custom objects to store the data and use memory bound comparisons to query the values instead of making single call every time in a loop.

4. Use the debug log to bulkify the code

Salesforce debug logs once enabled would display methods and soql queries executed on the code, object and trigger level. Some times there might be say 5 or more triggers created on each object like account or opportunity and there would be duplicate soql queries hidden on each trigger.

For eg. say there are 5 triggers on an account object, there might be soql queries executed again and again on each trigger to do some custom business logic. This would cause soql errors  against the governor limit. The solution is to combine the triggers having duplicate soql queries and implementing the business logic on one trigger.

5. Look for  Dreaded download features

There might be visual force pages built with download features to download the page using csv or pdf download. Now these download features would parse more records and would create a file in memory which would cause time out errors. To avoid this, build download features in batch mode using que concept where you can populate a custom object when an user clicks a download request. After the request is done, an apex job can run at scheduled intervals and populate the files in salesforce and send emails notifying on the download feature.

We specialize in building complex customer and partner portals which handles millions of records and follow several techniques to optimize the code and features to escape the governor limit. Please feel free to email us directly at info@thylaksoft.com or call us at 302-355-0449 for any questions.

Would it be nice if salesforce can push exception reports to us like opportunities not worked on or cases not worked on the last 30 days?

Would it be good if I can categorize my accounts and opportunities strategically and have my sales team work on the strategic accounts more based on deal size or recurring revenue?

Would it be nice if i can have a 360 view of my account and case?

To do all this, you have to build several custom reports and report types to do all this and it becomes a time consuming laborious process. If you want to do cross filter reports across objects with or without relationship, it cannot be done at all. Would it be not nice if salesforce can push the data to us on opportunities with no activities, cases which have no action and finally able to quickly categorize and segment data in the reports real time rather than downloading to excel spreadsheets and analyzing them?

We at Thylaksoft have a solution “Push Data out from Salesforce Service” which is also available to you in the form of spring 2012 release with the new Analytics feature. This was  a feature which salesforce wanted to charge as an addon module but gave it away free with an increased demand from the users.  So how do these features help you and how can you use them?

1. Bucket feature( Group opportunities by deal size or cases based on days open)

Buckets help to categorize accounts, opportunities on a report  easily. This is new type of filter which would allow you to choose fields and define the categories with a range of values and easily view the data in different ways than creating fields for each object.

Usage: If you want to say categorize your opportunities by deal size like opportunities with deal amount of 1M to 5m as low, 6 to 10m as medium and 10 and above as high, you would create buckets with the range filters and view all the data in an existing opportunity report easily.

2. Track what is not worked on using Cross filter( View opportunities or cases with or without activities)

Cross filter is a new feature on the report type which would allow you to create a filter condition called with or without on child objects easily on existing objects. You can also add sub filters under the cross filter easily.

Usage: If you want to display a report of opportunities with no activities for the  last 30 days, you would create an opportunity report and create a cross filter combing opportunity with activities using a with or without condition. You can also create sub filters like last modified date less than 30 days easily.

Business Value: This would help the sales and operation team to focus on the right cases and opportunities and report on opportunities and cases where there is no action done leading to increased sales or customer satisfaction.

3.  Create Score cards or 360 view of your accounts for your sales and operation team using join reports.

A join report is a report where you can combine several reports into one report side by side upto 5 and view data in a horizontal fashion independently. By dragging and dropping report types from several reports on one pane, we can easily combine all the reports in one reports.

Usage: If you want to know how your sales team and support team is doing in one view you can create reports on opportunities closing this month, cases resolved in the last 30 days and leads generated on multiple channels for the last 30 days would give you one view of sales, marketing and support in one view.

Business value: This would help to define score cards and metrics to track how effective your sales, operation and marketing team is working on a weekly or monthly basis. You can view a 360 view of your accounts in one view easily.

4. Easy to use feature

You can now drag and drop filters easily from the left pane using the report builder easily.

We are offering a Push data Out from Salesforce service which would make your crm report on exceptions, alerts, data insights and cross sell to your customers easily using the analytics edition. Please feel free to email me at info@thylaksoft.com or call us at 302-355-0449 for further questions regarding this.

Thanks

Buyan

How to email a report on opportunities where  there is no activity done  for last 30 days in salesforce?

The easiest  is just create a Report of Open Opportunities with a Last Modified Date not equal to the Last 30 Days.  Then schedule the report to run either Daily, Weekly, Monthly and emailed to him.